Almer/Blank Labs

Howdy all:

I know blogging's been light for the past several months. Work here at Almer/Blank has had me pretty consumed.

But, as I gear up and prepare for a busy autumn of talks and courses, you can expect some heavier posting.

First up, I'll be presenting at FITC San Francisco — the first SF installment of the really amazing FITC conferences.

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For the past few months, we've been running a contest to encourage suggestions around potential uses for Synthia, which you can hear at SynthiaHearsPictures.com.

The contest ended yesterday, and we picked a winner. Congratulations are in order to Kenny D. from Los Angeles, who provided the winning entry — and who will shortly receive a brand new iPad. …read more…

The OSMF team sent this to me to help get the word out, and I wanted to pass it along to you all.

On Wednesday, June 9th, Adobe will be hosting a FREE 90-minute session, run by Lisa Larson-Kelley, on the formal launch of the 1.0 version of the Adobe Open Source Media Framework (OSMF). Lisa will also cover the beta release of "Strobe Media Playback," a pre-compiled SWF media player (including source code) based on OSMF.

The invitation is here and you may register here.

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Interactive design and development company Almer/Blank is taking its new photo hunt game,  "Spot The Dogference,"  off the leash and out of its Venice Beach, Calif. studios. The fun, new game fetches two similar, yet different, photos of random dogs for a fast-paced, side-by-side comparison test of your eyes. In a twist on standard "Spot the Difference" -type apps, Spot The Dogference allows dog-loving users to get involved by submitting pictures of their four-legged companions so that they may be featured in future versions of the game.

The basic premise of Spot The Dogference is simple: a player views two seemingly identical dog images which actually have minor differences. The player must find and select all of the "dogferences"  before the timer runs out. The faster the player finishes each round, the higher the score. There are currently three levels of play plus a "Bonus" level, with each one becoming increasingly difficult as a player advances.

Other features of Spot The Dogference:

• Integrated Twitter status. A user may log in and have their Twitter status updated with their Spot The Dogference score - a sort of "high score" board. All scores are also updated on the "Spot The Dogference" Twitter account at twitter.com/dogference.
• Integrated AddThis functionality (formerly ClearSpring). Users can share Spot The Dogference across multiple social networks, such as Facebook and MySpace.
• Mochi Ads. These banner ads, placed within the game play, allow for Spot The Dogference to be self-sustaining and free for users to play.
• Structure: The game was architected using the PureMVC framework, allowing maximum portability and reducing future engineering hours with rebranding.

Sit, stay and then roll over to the site to see how well you Spot the Dogference! www.spotthedogference.com

I tried to record my 'Standardize Your Flash with Adobe OSMF' talk from FITC Toronto — and, lo and behold, it actually seems to have worked.

So I edited it down a bit (cutting out the Q&A, which unfortunately was not audible on my microphone), chopped the sections down into individual videos, and posted them to YouTube. I thought it might be a good reference if I embedded all of them in a single post, along with the source code you'll want for each lesson if you wish to follow along in Flash CS4 or CS5.

In this talk, I cover:
- what is OSMF
- OSMF capabilities
- The basic structure of an OSMF player, including the MediaElement, MediaPlayer and MediaComposition
- Dynamic Streaming (the files for that video also include HTTP Streaming)
- Subclipping
- The key MediaPlayer properties and events required to build a media player

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